Cycle 3 – Unknown Creators

For this cycle I had a few ideas. My first one was that I wanted to add some amount of interactivity, as the project felt stagnant. I wasn’t sure how I wanted to do this though. At first I thought I could go back and use some of that tech I made from Pressure Project 3 that I didn’t end up using. Maybe the panels could have knobs on them or something? After talking about where I wanted the project to go with my mentor, it seemed like maybe interactivity wasn’t the way to go. Adding layers of interactivity could potentially confuse people as to what the project is about, and instead Scott emphasized expanding scope to talk more broadly about the subject outside of game development (he gave an example about how one side could be a politician talking about the problems a certain indigenous group and then footage of that group and what they actually had issues with). There are certainly ways of adding interactivity but I did want to expand towards media in general since who don’t know about the games industry can’t meaningfully interact with the piece anyways

Oftentimes, when I would talk about the project, I would reference many different kinds of media, like film or theater, and I wanted to incorporate examples of what I was talking about from these areas too. I ended up pulling examples from two people who I think are better known than Todd Howard: Guillermo Del Toro, Academy Award-winning director, and Michael Jackson, who uhh… is Michael Jackson. I went and collected footage from the making of Pinocchio, a relatively recent film of Del Toro’s that I knew had a ton of talented stop-motion people working on. This is the video that I used for that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWZ_K7oKu-o

I pulled an example of a well-regarded stop motion animator and puppeteer, Georgina Hayns. She is better known among stop-motion enthusiasts and creators but most lei people probably don’t know who she is, including me. I also pulled an interview of Del Toro from CBS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7xcED5GoaA

For Michael Jackson, I pulled some old interview footage from 1978: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTTl4Vaow5Y

For the person behind the scenes, I decided to go with Brad Buxer, who I know worked with Michael Jackson and other famous creators like Stevie Wonder from my own personal research and intrigue (I was first told about this via Harry Brewis’s video about the origins of the Roblox oof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0twDETh6QaI). Typically in the music industry there are creators that write lyrics or melodies that don’t get credited to the same degree, and Brad talks about how it’s easy for big creators to pawn off creation to people who work under them. This is a whole different issue, but I think this example is really good since Michael Jackson is a really well known celebrity. Here is Brad Buxer’s Masterclass course that I used for footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlYQooIyCAI. What’s funny is that it was actually speculated that Michael Jackson did the music for Sonic 3, but what’s interesting is that Brad Buxer actually is credited for Sonic 3 music and because he is known for working with Michael Jackson, credit is usually give to Jackson. This isn’t completely relevant to the project, I just thought it was interesting that there is a tie back to the games industry. Come to think of it Guillermo Del Toro is also really good friends with another well known game developer, Hideo Kojima, small world I guess.

Anyways, same as before, I had to take the footage and throw it into Premiere Pro to splice it and edit in names and such.

Once again I displayed the project and people felt like I was getting even closer to properly conveying intent. Orlando hadn’t seen any iterations of this project and his interpretation was very close to what I had intended. There was a lot of great conversation sparked too, which was great to see! Overall I’m very happy with this iteration of the project, I’m thinking about applying for a motion lab residency to continue work on this, but for now I’m done.